


Interrogatives?—Season 1

by Polly_Lynn



Series: Interrogatives? [1]
Category: Castle (TV 2009)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Humor, Estrangement, F/M, Family, Female Friendship, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Gen, Humor, Male-Female Friendship, Partners to Lovers, Romance, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-07
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-17 22:00:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 9,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28607130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: So. Yeah. I completely broke up with the show and then . . . pandemic? And the worst semester of my life? And general world on fire? In any case, I watched through the series again and did a story per episode, just as I did with Dialogic, and then with Object Lessons. So each chapter is an independent, episode-based story. It will take me a while to get these posted, but there are another 151 stories and I'll divvy them up by season.
Relationships: Kate Beckett & Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Richard Castle
Series: Interrogatives? [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2096184
Comments: 3
Kudos: 15





	1. Epicenter—Flowers for Your Grave (1 x 01)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What was I thinking, Mom?” 

> _“And do you know, you have gorgeous eyes?”  
>  — Richard Castle, Flowers for Your Grave (1 x 01)_

* * *

“What was I thinking, Mom?” 

She’s closing her apartment door and turning the locks against a world that’s enjoying the cosmic joke that is Richard Castle. She is _not_ enjoying that cosmic joke. She is questioning every choice she has made that might have led her to this moment in time. She is talking out loud to her dead mother. She’s had better nights. 

“I thought Lanie would get it,” she grumbles as she hangs up her coat, kicks off her heels, rakes merciless fingers through hair that’s still short enough to surprise her every time. “Aren’t ‘BFFs’ supposed to get it no matter what?”

She has a moment’s insight that the air quotes around _BFF_ s and her own stony silence and white-knuckled grip on her beer might have something to do with the fact that Lanie had spent fully half their evening out cataloging the finer points of Richard “Cosmic Joke” Castle’s, and the other half searching for synonyms for _lickable._ But she doesn’t _want_ insight right now. She wants to rant and roar. She wants someone to take her side unreservedly _._

She wants her mom. 

She blames him for it, though that’s no fairer on her part than heaping blame on Lanie for trying to steer their evening clear of the cul-de-sac of Richard Castle–inspired catastrophism. She always wants her mom, though it’s the kind of longing that exists out of the corner of her eye. It has to be. And now he has her stirred up. He has her talking out loud to her for the first time in months—in years, probably. 

He has, with his smug cold reading, managed to tug at the knot that makes up the center of her. He has annoyingly, expertly found the exact loose thread that’s left her with all these soft, useless emotions dangling free and tripping her up—regret, loneliness, _want_. 

She passes by the living room couch and has to suppress the mostly unfamiliar urge to simply flop there, face down and fully clothed. She makes her way to the bedroom like a reasonable person, like a _functional_ person, though she feels anything but right now. 

She means to make her way through her nightly ritual—button-down and trousers off, gun, ring, and watch stowed. She supposes this might be one of those nights where she allows herself to brush a fingertip kiss over her mom’s black-and-white cheek. This might be one of those nights where she lets herself imagine what reply her mom might have made to her amateur dramatics. 

But it’s not a night like that, exactly. It’s not a night like any in recent memory. 

She finds herself on her knees in front of the low bedroom bookcase, now safely repopulated with the hardbacks she’d toted to the precinct and back. She finds herself with fingers skipping over the spines of his one-off works, with her palm splaying wide to obscure the titles she won’t be able to see for a good long while without imagining the victims— _Marvin Fisk, Alison Tisdale, Kendra Pitney._

Her fingertips hook, one, two, over the top edge of the Derrick Storm books she hadn’t known she’d come looking for. She settles clumsily into a cross-legged position. Her hands work in tandem to settle the books on her left knee, her right knee. They work in tandem to creak the covers carefully open to the inscribed title pages— _To Johanna, To Kate._

“I met him, Mom,” she says softly as she traces the dramatic swoop of the _J_ with the tip of her thumb. “ _Really_ met him,” she adds and there’s some bite to that. There’s a defensive eye roll that would not have fooled her mother even one little bit. “He’s … not what I thought he’d be.” 

The words are trite enough—true enough—that she has to laugh. She has to entertain the cosmic joke that Richard Castle has an ego on him the size of Manhattan, but he also has a charming, daffy mother and a kid who seems to be fifteen going on whatever age he is plus one. He swills champagne she’d measure in pay checks, and he seems genuinely enthused by the prospect of a street cart hot dog. 

_Oh, so he’s human. He’s_ not _just a glossy photo on a book jacket?_ The music of her mother’s voice fills her completely. She remembers, with perfect recall, the feeling of her cheek burrowed into the gentle strength of her shoulder and the loving, impatient rap of knuckles against against her forehead. _Now, honestly, Katie, what did you expect?_

“Nothing,” she grumbles, and even to her own ears, she sounds like she’s twenty-nine going on fifteen. “Everything.” 

She closes the books and slides them, one, two, back onto the shelf. She taps the spines into alignment with the flat of her palm and pushes to her feet. She tugs her gun from its holster and lays it in the velvet-lined box. Her watch follows it into the shallow upper drawer, and after an almost imperceptible pause, the ring on its delicate chain. She closes the lid and raises her fingertips to her lips, but the kiss intended for her mother’s black-and-white cheek is suspended in mid-air. 

“He thinks I— _you_ —have gorgeous eyes,” she whispers. “I didn’t expect that.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Is this a thing? I don’t know. I am out of other things to watch on the dreadmill, so here I am again. I guess this is a thing on its own, even if it’s never a thing attached to anything else?   
> 


	2. Guesstimate—Nanny McDead (1 x 02)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Detective Kate Beckett, NYPD, makes him feel … creaky. She is a far greater challenge—in real time and on the page—than he’s faced in years, and trying to get a read on her requires flexing some long-disused muscles. For example, there’s a lot of math involved. She plays everything so close to the vest that it’s an absolute job requirement, and he’s more than a little rusty. 

> _“Where’s the Girl?”  
> _ _— Javier Esposito, Nanny McDead (1 x 02)_
> 
> * * *

Detective Kate Beckett, NYPD, makes him feel … creaky. She is a far greater challenge—in real time and on the page—than he’s faced in years, and trying to get a read on her requires flexing some long-disused muscles. For example, there’s a lot of math involved. She plays everything so close to the vest that it’s an absolute job requirement, and he’s more than a little rusty. 

It’s days before he has even a rough estimate of how old she is. It seems easy enough at first. He subtracts a certain number of years from her pointedly severe hair. The cut and color, though attractive, have a decided _Take Me Seriously Or Else_ vibe, but she’s otherwise too well put together for the hair to be some kind of oblivious hold over. The hair is trying too hard, yes, but it’s functional, too. It’s something she still needs because the professional jackasses of the world feel beholden to weigh in on what smart, good-looking women with options ought to be doing with their time. 

He lops off another year or two when he discovers just how deep her sugar problem runs. As far as he can tell, she lives on breakfast pastries, the panoply of candy she has squirreled away in every possible corner of her desk, and the tragic approximation of chocolate she gets out of the vending machine. All of this, coupled with her need for a steady stream of incoming caffeine, tells him that college is still in the rearview mirror for her.

That particular math pulls him up short. She’s younger than him. That’s not news. But he counts on his fingers and doesn’t want to look, in case it turns out that she’s closer to his kid’s age than to his own. It’s not quite that dire, according to his calculations, but she’s _young,_ and no wonder she feels like she needs the hair and the spiked heels and all the rest of it. She needs that armor for the work she’s called on to do, day after day. She needs that armor, because she is the one who has to call the parents and lovers and sisters and brothers of victims with college still in the rearview mirror. 

But it’s not just on-the-job armor she needs. The hair and the heels, the acid tongue and the _Don’t Fuck With Me_ stride are things she needs _—_ things she _has_ needed for years he can’t yet count—to keep herself upright in the world. That revelation comes when he sees her with Chloe Richardson, though his math is off at first. 

He assumes it’s a performance, the way she stoops to set her gun aside, the way she stays on level with the little-girl swing of the young woman’s feet as they dangle from the edge of the laundry room table. He thinks of his mother, of Meredith, of Gina, and he cynically assumes. But the _Go To Hell_ flash she meets him with is too … informative for him to regret it as much as he probably should, at least from a professional standpoint. 

From a professional standpoint, it recalibrates his ear for her dialogue. It underscores key passages— _Don’t think you know me. Easier to write about than to live through, huh, Castle?_ It tells him that she may have a world-class power to conceal, but what she reveals, unintentionally or of necessity, is absolute truth. From a professional standpoint, that flash tells him his first lucky shot wasn’t so lucky after all. She _is_ that wounded, though whatever happened did not happen to her. 

And from a personal standpoint, that complicates far more than the math of her, though that’s what he sticks to. Out of respect or self-preservation, out of panic or mistrust of his own creaky inner workings, he sticks to the math when he sits down to write that night. 

He shows his work on the page. He sketches his own stand-in using broad strokes and Nikki with careful details anchored to real-world observations that he may or may not ultimately have an obligation to in the book—that she is closer, by far, to her first heartbreak than he is to his, in both time and distance run; that she is guarded and tentative where he is brash and jaded. 

His fingers fly over the keys, moving between his main text and the marginalia—between fiction and fact—but his own armor fails him in the end. The stream of characters slows and truth, aching like poetry, slips into the creaking spaces between his facts and figures. 

She is so very young in some ways, and in others, she’s never been young at all. She’s never gotten to _be_ young. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Probably not a thing? IDK. 


	3. Moniker—Hedge Fund Homeboys (1 x 03)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She doesn’t know what to call him. Not to his face—she has plenty of ideas about that, and she relishes every opportunity to field test her most creative epithets. But she doesn’t know what to call him in the various places she moves through in the course of any given workday, and he is now underfoot in every single one of them. 

> _“Who’s the sidekick?”  
>  — Ian Yankman, Hedge Fund Homeboys (1 x 03)_
> 
> * * *

She doesn’t know what to call him. Not to his face—she has plenty of ideas about that, and she relishes every opportunity to field test her most creative epithets. But she doesn’t know what to call him in the various places she moves through in the course of any given workday, and he is now underfoot in every single one of them. 

When they’re at the precinct and it’s just them—Montgomery and the boys, her and him—she mostly calls him _Castle_. She’s not alone in it. Everyone—up to and including people _she_ barely knows—mostly calls him _Castle._ The easy camaraderie of it annoys her. He’s not even a cop. He’s only been around for a few weeks, but the in-jokes and high fives, the secret handshakes and enthusiastic waves from cops and civilian staff alike make it seem like he’s been a fixture for years. 

She has lobbed a _Rick_ or two at him, just to roll the possibility around on her tongue. She’s hit him right between the eyes with her most withering _Ricky_ on the numerous occasions when he’s been steadfast in his refusal to stay in his lane, but neither option is right for in the box or out of the precinct. And anyway, he just grins when she uses either version— _Rick, Ricky_. He looks just delighted by the intimacy of his name on her lips, and she thinks she really might take advantage of that baroque waiver he signed and shoot him. Or at least slam those million-dollar fingers of his in her most savage desk drawer. 

When they are outside the precinct, introducing him as Richard Castle is—nine times out of ten—a mistake. People know the name from his books, from his _Page 6_ exploits, from the talk show circuit, from rubbing elbows in a past life, and they fawn. Or they know they _should_ know the name and he gives them hints with a coy smile. They guess and the fawning commences and her interview—her _work_ —gets completely derailed.

She tends to go with _Mr. Castle_ for most of their in-home interviews, but the choice is far from perfect. The confused looks that cross the faces of her interviewees drive home the fact that salutation–surname merely confirms he’s not a cop without offering any further information. And no matter how flat and matter-of-fact she makes her tone, there’s a heated look she absolutely will not stand for every time she uses it. She _especially_ will not stand for it in the aftermath of the plaid skirts and knee socks conversation and all it implies about why it is that _Mr. Castle_ lights his fire.

It’s worse than just not knowing what to call him, though. She doesn’t know how to _explain_ him to anyone. She doesn’t know how to explain him to herself. She declines to elaborate on the Mister/Not-A-Cop option, because what would she say? He’s not precisely a colleague, and he’s certainly not a friend. She’s probably not allowed to say that he’s a brass-mandated pain in her ass, so how could she possibly communicate the how and the why of his presence? 

_Consultant?_ he offers when the two of them make their way back to holding. Yankman, is yanking her chain, per usual, and she fails to dodge the direct question. In the absence of a better option, she echoes the title. In the moment, she wants—quite literally—to bite off the tip of her tongue. 

Later, though, she wishes the word would stick. She likes its meaninglessness and its clinical distance. She likes the implication that whatever he’s doing at any given moment has little to do with her or the real work of solving homicides. 

She likes it, but she sees the Good Ship, _Consultant_ sailing off into the sunset even before they they have Brandon in cuffs. And the fact of the matter is that they have Brandon in cuffs because he— _Castle_ , as she mostly calls him—is not simply an annoyance or an afterthought. 

He’s an ass and an asset, an idiot and an ideal mental sparring partner. He has demonstrated the value of having a semi-famous distraction in the box, in the high-rise office and the down-sized apartment. He has demonstrated his quick thinking in an interrogation, and his ability to pick up on her cues—or to pretend he’s _not_ picking them up, giving her room to work she wouldn’t otherwise have. 

He is Castle, she concludes, though she couldn’t say exactly what that means, coming from her. He is her cross to bear and occasionally her bumbling weapon to wield. And he seems to have earned the surname-only treatment. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Remember Sidekicks? Remember Snoop and Jessica Simpson [It was Paris Hilton, not JS—What is wrong with me? — Ed.] trying to do laundry? Of course you don’t. You remember only murder storms and quarantine. This is almost certainly not a thing. 


	4. Monostitch—Hell Hath No Fury (1 x 04)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Detective Beckett, in general, has her evenings free. He hasn’t quite been able to wrap his mind around this apparent truth since it first became … well, apparent, pretty early on. In fact, he had spent the first few weeks of their acquaintance assuming that it couldn’t be true. He’d been dead sure this was yet one more facet of her almost preternatural skill in guarding information about herself. 

> _“Are you sure I can’t tempt you?”  
>  — Bruce Kirby, Hell Hath No Fury (1 x 04)_
> 
> * * *

Detective Beckett, in general, has her evenings free. He hasn’t quite been able to wrap his mind around this apparent truth since it first became … well, _apparent_ , pretty early on. In fact, he had spent the first few weeks of their acquaintance assuming that it couldn’t be true. He’d been dead sure this was yet one more facet of her almost preternatural skill in guarding information about herself. 

But he’d asked around, confident in the fact that nine out of ten people find unbridled nosiness rather charming, provided it’s a best-selling novelist doing the nosing—and the tenth person is disqualified for being Kate Beckett. So he’d asked and asked again, and if no one around the Twelfth was either stupid or suicidal enough to confirm his suspicion outright, the sheer number of eyes averted and throats uncomfortably cleared make for an impressive circumstantial case. 

And even still, he’d been surprised in retrospect to find her skulking around the darkened bull pen last night, trying desperately to look as though she’d been sabotaging his gift, rather than surrendering at last to the siren song of the steamer. _Not_ in retrospect, he’d been too excited by the fruits of his research to do such much as pick up the phone before rushing over there, and yes, there’s some situational irony inherent in the fact that—prostitute dates notwithstanding—his dance card, these days, is empty enough to verify that hers is, too. 

And now, as if to remove all doubt that the evenings of Detective Beckett are there for the taking, here she is again, apparently with enough free time on her hands to make it painfully clear that it’s not just among the world’s more perplexing mysteries, it’s an outright crime: She is off the clock and decked out. 

When his lungs eventually reacquaint themselves with air, his brain immediately decides that his first order of business is to rectify that crime. In fact, his brain is so insistent on seeking justice for Detective Beckett’s evenings that he very nearly fails to finish the reading. A timely impression of fire ants feasting on an unfortunate fool’s vitreous humor from Alexis saves his bacon there. He stammers his way through the final lines and closes the book with a snap. He tries to strike out for the back of the crowd. 

The crowd has other ideas, though. He’s immediately swarmed and the fire-ant impression is too fresh in his mind for him to risk playing the role of Black Pawn’s problem child author tonight. And he really tries to be more wise-ass than jackass whenever possible. So he keeps one eye on the good Detective’s _gotcha_ smirk and the other on the interchangeable faces that swim before him, asking the questions he can answer in his sleep, paying the compliments he has practically Pavlovian responses to at this point. 

He’s resigned to things dragging on, to a certain extent. He’s learned that there’s little point in trying to rush through the first wave when there’s always a second, a third, a fourth. He amuses himself by working through this new— _ahem_ —body of evidence regarding her social life. Now that he’s managed to peel his eyes away from the sheer amount of leg on display, he starts to work his way through the tale the dress tells. 

It’s not great, honestly. It’s seasons out of date, which suggests she hasn’t had much call to update it. So, free evenings seem to be a theme that goes back a ways for her, and neither the style nor the color is doing her any particular favors. Then again, she doesn’t need too many favors done, but it lends a poignant twist to things. He pictures her grabbing it off the rack in a rushed moment of frustration, without benefit of a mom, a sister, a friend to call for the sanity check that might have landed her in something that wouldn’t have looked immediately dated. 

He’s on the very brink of wallowing in the images of her lonely life that his mind is conjuring up when suddenly she is not lonely at all. There’s a startled murmur from the gaggle of women around him. He has a feeling he’s just done some kind of cartoon double take, but honestly, the creep invading her dance space seems to have just materialized out of nowhere. 

He abruptly excuses himself, veering around the following wave before it can wash over him. As he swims upstream, he realizes that Detective Beckett’s new friend has _not_ materialized out of nowhere. He has, in fact, simply emerged from a veritable sea of men—not a one of whom at least has the decency to have come to his reading—gravitating toward her from the far corners of the store. 

He reaches her, at last, and it’s gratifying that she turns her back on the first creep on the scene right away. Even if it is only to make fun of him, it’s still gratifying, and he’d happily spend any one of their mutually free evenings verbally sparring just like this. He’d happily spend a hundred of them letting her cut him down to size, but there’s a sea of men pressing in around them. There must be a sea of men everywhere she goes, and yet, in general, Detective Beckett has her evenings free. How strange.   
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I do believe he can tempt her; I still don’t believe this is a thing


	5. Aloud—A Chill Goes Through Her Veins (1 x 05)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She has never been clear about the rules that govern her—that have governed her since she made the choice years ago to step back from the brink. No more.

> _“Did I stop, or did something stop me?”  
> _ _— Alexis Castle, A Chill Goes Through Her Veins (1 x 05)_

* * *

She has never been clear about the rules that govern her—that _have_ governed her since she made the choice years ago to step back from the brink. _No more._

The simple dictate covers—has had to cover—a tremendous amount of ground: No more running herself into the ground, day and night, going over and over shoddily collected evidence that will always lead nowhere. No more risking her career trying to skirt rules, gain access, pursue leads and contacts without sanction. 

The professional end of things had been—is still, most of the time—simple enough. She plays strictly by the rules. She channels her grief and passion into her cases. She hones her skills ceaselessly and every moment of her professional life, she strives to do better than the complacent, incurious minds that leave so many adrift on an uncertain sea. She roots out the Elizabeth Fortés and Charles Wylers of the world who cry peace, because she knows there _is_ no peace. There are only answers if she does her job right. And she always does her job right. 

It’s the personal end where the rules get fuzzy, where she thinks she has gone astray. It’s in the quiet of her own mind that she feels lost. A memory has come to her lately—it keeps coming to her—of walking out on her therapist in the days after she’d made her decision. 

_No more._

She had left, literally, mid-session, utterly disinclined to sit there any longer and entertain an absurd version of the world in which she could talk, talk, _talk_ about her mother’s murder—about the myriad effects it has had on her life—and not _do_ anything about it.

The move, belatedly, seems melodramatic. The idea behind it seems flatly impractical—that she should never again speak of it, or even wonder what happened, why it happened, in her own heart of hearts? It seems impossible, childish. It seems almost comically unlike her, given the rapacious need for answers that still drives her. 

And yet this foolish insistence _is_ part of the choice that governs her—that has governed her and left casualties along the way. She does not talk about her mother’s murder. She does not talk about her mother. 

People know. The Captain, by virtue of chance meeting, knows. The boys and Lanie because they care—because they are her friends, because they know the scars she bears. 

Everyone tangled up in the precinct grapevine knows, because she requires explanation. Even among her intimate circle of good, dedicated cops, her tenacity and dogged pursuit of the whole of things demands some kind of origin story. So people know, but almost without exception, she is not the one to talk about the murder. She is not the one to talk about her mother. 

It is enough, she has told herself all this time, to have the talisman of her mother’s ring with her always. It is enough that she has her dad and their tentative, sidelong conversations where they lay their memories of her mother out like the good silver, then pack them away again lest they tarnish. _No more_ means not succumbing to the ravening sense of loss, and she has told herself all this time that these things have to be enough. 

Then, in an instant, by the light of the desk lamp, it is not enough. 

She does not understand why he should be the one who shifts the ground beneath her feet. She does not understand why that should matter, given the damage done over the years by her staunch refusal to run through the details of her greatest sorrow in the service of what she’s told herself is a pointless kind of performative intimacy. 

But the ground shifts, and unprompted, she becomes the author of her own story. He knows the ending. She fills in the facts, such as they are, and it all resonates to hell and back—from Raglan to Sloane, from her father to Ben Davidson, from Melanie Cavanaugh’s children to her. 

She makes a joke at the end. He makes one, too. They are kind to one another in the charged moment that follows. They let the story as she has told it settle between them. They part ways only after reaffirming their respective roles. 

_I’m a writer._

_I’m a cop._

But she has been a writer tonight. She has unexpectedly spoken, and in speaking, she does not feel the catharsis that long-ago therapist wanted for her. There is no epiphany or closure or peace. But there is … space suddenly within her like a welcome gap left on a shelf by a book loaned out to a friend. She has unexpectedly spoken, and here within her, is a new, tiny, curious space.   
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: 2020 landed another painful blow today. This is pretty rocky and not a thing.


	6. Exordium—Always Buy Retail (1 x 06)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is, as expected, a giant whoosh of relief the very instant the door closes behind Meredith. It runs visibly through his mother, slightly less visibly—and considerably more shamefacedly—through his daughter, and invisibly (he hopes) through him.

> _“Are you having a breakdown?”  
> _ _—Kate Beckett, Always Buy Retail (1x 06)_
> 
> * * *

There is, as expected, a giant _whoosh_ of relief the very instant the door closes behind Meredith. It runs visibly through his mother, slightly less visibly—and considerably more shamefacedly—through his daughter, and invisibly (he hopes) through him.

The relief lasts the rest of the night—a night he spends in his blissfully quiet, paper-festooned office with the door shut on the ruins of the bedroom he’ll have to do something about at some point. It lasts him straight through to the next morning, when he tears himself away from the impressive number of scenes that still need sequencing to make Alexis cheering-up pancakes that they both know are really the pancakes of profound, Meredith-free relief. 

Most of the shamefacedness is gone, he’s glad to see. It’s gotten harder for his daughter to walk the maternal tightrope these last few years, but she is nothing if not resilient. Still, he’s glad to see her tucking into the pancakes, glad to have her scolding him about crowding extra chocolate chips into the smile, even as she preferentially carves out and wolfs down exactly those gooey bits.

Their morning bobs along on a calm sea until Alexis’s cell phone rings on the counter beside her plate. Their eyes meet and he sees in her the same anticipation he feels—the second _whoosh_ as Meredith’s plane takes off, removing her safely from the city. 

“Mom,” Alexis confirms as she dabs her mouth with a napkin. 

She answers and he busies himself clearing up as she performs her half of Meredith’s usual, melodramatic ritual of parting. It seems to go on longer than usual. It _does_ go on longer than usual, apparently. 

“Shoot, I’m gonna be late.” Alexis slides off the stool and moves to clear her dishes. 

“I’ve got ‘em. You go.” He shoos her toward the door. “Can’t be tardy. It’ll look bad when I come by later to spring you so we can hit Coney Island.” 

“Good thinking.” She kisses him on the cheek. “Just no dead grandpas. I’m fresh out, and when Mr. Simmons catches on, I _will_ out you as a liar.” 

She’s out the door, then. She is on her way to school. With her, she takes _whoosh one_ and _whoosh two_ , and he is left not relieved at all. He is left with a Vintage Meredith Vignette falling into place around him. 

* * *

It’s kind of a dick move on his part to head to the precinct. He’d planned to spend the day with his pages. Or rather he’d told himself he’d spend the day dealing with the bedroom, while fully intending to spend the day with his pages, but he has no enthusiasm for either option, so he goes to haunt her, and haunt her he does. There’s nothing at all going on, so he fidgets and fusses. He goes for coffee and comes back without it. He peppers her with absolutely inane questions. It’s a total dick move to inflict himself on her in this state, and she’s not inclined to let him get away with it. 

“Castle, what the hell is with you?” She snatches the staple remover out of his hand and sets it pointedly on the far side of the desk, along with a legal pad that looks like it’s suffered a gator attack all along one margin. “Missing the Twinkie already?” 

“Definitely not,” he says with far more naked force than he’d intended. He makes an ill-advised attempt to cover. “In fact, I could do with a …“ —he flicks a glance up and down her body—“fine sorbet. A palate cleanser.” 

She gives him the kind of eye roll that truly makes him worry for her ocular health and welfare. “How about a hot dog?” 

“A hot dog?” He’s surprised. He thinks she she might be surprised, too, given the way she’s vigorously digging in her bottomless bottom drawer in a mostly unsuccessful bid to hide he sudden color in her cheeks. 

“A hot dog.” She comes up with her shoulder bag and stands. “You think I’m going to stay in hock to you forever for that … cow’s foot lunch?” 

“No.” He blinks. He moves to follow and presses his strange, sudden luck. “I just wasn’t expecting a second date so soon.” 

* * *

“So, you’re a mustard and onions woman,” he says as they settle on the park bench. 

He half expects a third-tier game show host to materialize to present him with an award for lamest line. He steals a sheepish look at her and she seems to be expecting exactly the same thing. 

“I’m not letting you back in the precinct until you’ve got whatever this is,” she makes a gesture in the shape of an awkward, fidgeting mess, “out of your system.”

He opens his mouth. He has some smart-ass comment locked and loaded that’s sure to devolve into bickering—it’s sure to divert attention from whatever _this_ is. He closes his mouth. It dawns on him that he doesn’t want to bicker. He doesn’t want to divert. 

He wants to talk to someone about Meredith, whose brand of low-key evil is something he’s always thought of as mostly fine, or at least intermittent enough that it couldn’t do much harm. He wants to talk to someone about the fact that it’s _not_ fine and how weary he is of having to walk this tightrope. He wants to talk to her. 

And the dawn keeps coming, as he realizes that she— _she_ —has made space for that here. She doesn’t owe him a lunch, and she could have cheerfully kicked him out of the precinct three legal pads and a bottle of Liquid Paper ago. But she hasn’t. She has made a friendly overture, albeit one that’s decidedly impatient and—by the way—awkward on her end, too. 

He wants to take her up on it. He wants to talk to her, but he’s terribly out of practice at talking— _really_ talking—to anyone. 

“Your parents are normal, right? No more manipulative than the average bear?” Words—the wrong words—come tumbling out of him. “No pretending to be dead on the floor when you came home from school, just to see how you’d react?”

“No?” she can’t quite suppress the look of a deer in headlights. “No … playing dead.” 

She looks like she’s casting about for more to say, but he steamrolls over her. “They’re not, like, pathological liars inclined to emotionally blackmail you into going along with their lies?” 

“Not … really?” Her face screws up like a few more ellipses and a handful of question marks are still stuck in her teeth. “Pretty normal parents,” she says, finally. 

He looks at her. She looks at him. He cracks first. He laughs until he’s pressing his side with one hand and pounding the bench with the other. She holds out longer. She keeps it mostly together, but she can’t entirely tamp down these short, adorable trills of laughter at the utter absurdity of the conversation. 

“Man,” He gasps at last. He shakes his head and wipes his eyes. A tiny _whoosh_ of relief runs through him. “Normal parents. What’s that like?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I never know which dumb ones are going to get long. Still not a thing.


	7. Word Choice—Home is Where the Heart Stops (1 x 07)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She enjoys surprising him. It is, in fact, her current favorite hobby. 

> _“Wouldn’t it be more of a challenge if they weren’t standing still?”  
> _ _— Richard Castle, Home Is Where the Heart Stops (1 x 07)_

* * *

She enjoys surprising him. It is, in fact, her current favorite hobby. 

She figures if he’s going to be the thorn in her side, the pebble in her shoe, the wonky-wheeled shopping cart in her day—every day—the least she can do is get some pleasure out of knocking the know-it-all expression off his face as often as possible. And she _does_ knock it off with satisfying regularity. 

Lately, she’s managed to get him with an impeccably timed reverse double-jinx one minute. And not long after that, she lands a knockout combo by dropping the word _hyperbolic_ in the course of casually revealing that why yes, she _does_ read the _New York Review of Books_ and she knows bribery when she sees it _._ The two, taken together, are quite the success: One of her favorite ways to surprise him is by defying the stoic, straight-laced caricature of her that he’s clearly settled on, it’s by slyly reminding him of the fact that there’s _no trace of the boroughs_ when she talks and she is an onion as yet unpeeled. 

She enjoys, considerably less, being surprised by him, and he can be damnably surprising. Sometimes, anyway. Name dropping and courtly hand-kisses are not at all surprising, nor is his cheeky declaration that he’s _currently between scandals_. His behind-her-back shenanigans with the career jewel thief he just happens to know, because of course he knows a career jewel thief, and then his utterly transparent maneuvering to have her on his arm while he plays undercover cop—those are not surprising in the _least._

But just when she has him pegged as a poseur, a dilettante, a klutz, and a menace who is good for nothing, other than making her job a thousand times harder, he whirls and hits a paper target, center mass in a tight grouping— _bam, bam, bam!_ He comes at Evan Mitchell with an angle she’d never have dreamed of and turns his dopey Jimmy Olsen act into the first solid lead they’ve actually had. 

He’s surprising–not surprising all at once, sometimes, and she definitely does not enjoy that brand of whiplash when it comes to him. She is prepared for the fundraiser to be a disaster that he has hand-crafted especially for her. But then, instead of casting himself as Robert Redford—or worse yet, Richard Gere—he plays goofy fairy godmother with the dress and does absolutely no swaggering about it when she arrives at the loft. He beams with unalloyed, uncomplicated pride and pleasure when he introduces her to “The Big Cheese,” and when the Mayor heartily declares that she’s just as pretty as Castle said she was, she gets hung up on the word. 

_Pretty._ She blushes at a word so specific, it must be a direct quotation, and it’s strange that the word he uses when he talks about her to “Bob” isn’t hot or stunning or gorgeous or smokin’. It’s _pretty,_ and that has the ring of an afterthought about it. That comes distinctly at the end of a long list of other things—flattering, laudatory things—he’s said about her to one of the most powerful men in New York. _Pretty._ It’s not boys-will-be-boys lascivious, it’s oddly sincere. It’s … quaint, and she never would have guessed. 

The evening bleeds right into the next day, and he is maddeningly full of surprises. But _pretty_ is the one that stays with her. Even when he seems to be dying of embarrassment at the prospect of being auctioned off, rather than preening like a peacock who’s just won first prize in the Twelfth Annual Peacock Vanity Contest as she would have predicted. Even when he tries to stay in the car, for once, instead of giving chase in his his stupid tuxedo shoes, and even when ends up pinning their guy down so he doesn’t get away. Even when he offers eggs as an even exchange for her having saved his life—nothing surprises her more than the certainty that when he brags about her to his high-powered friends, he tells them that on top of all the other stuff, _she’s pretty._

She’s not sure why this is the thing that stays with her when before, during, and after the adventure she had been truly dreading, he was absolutely full of surprises. She only knows that it _does_ stay with her. It picks away at the caricature of him that she’s clearly settled on and leaves her with loose threads, any one of which, if pulled, might undo entirely the superficial, self-involved, oversexed, entitled ass who might turn out to live only in her mind. 

It’s surprising, or maybe it isn’t. Maybe it shouldn’t be, but it’s pretty damned annoying. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: It’s a word, not a thing. Much as this continues to defy thingness.


	8. Aversion—Ghosts (1 x 08)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From the start, he does not like Lee Wax. It hardly seems noteworthy. She has a creepy stalker shrine featuring their victim. As a general rule, that’s a big check in the Do Not Like column. She leaves her door not just unlocked, but standing open when she goes to take out the trash. That marks her as a transplant—possibly from the turnip truck dimension—rather than a real New Yorker. And it may be petty, but that’s another checkity check right there. 

> “Do you need to check with your boss lady?”  
> — Lee Wax, Ghosts (1 x 08)

* * *

From the start, he does not like Lee Wax. It hardly seems noteworthy. She has a creepy stalker shrine featuring their victim. As a general rule, that’s a big check in the Do Not Like column. She leaves her door not just unlocked, but standing open when she goes to take out the trash. That marks her as a transplant—possibly from the turnip truck dimension—rather than a real New Yorker. And it may be petty, but that’s another checkity check right there. 

She is concerned, to the exclusion of all else, with covering her own fugitive-harboring ass and maintaining the viability of her memoir-turned-true-crime “book.” None of that is going to get her on the Christmas card list, certainly, but even worse, her dramatic tone and over-the-top body language in the interrogation room suggest that she thinks she has a flair for storytelling. She does not have a flair for storytelling, and he does not like her one bit. 

His Not-A-Fan sense tingles when Beckett asks for the manuscript and interview notes. Wax immediately produces the obviously tragically overwritten behemoth; her sudden cooperation is very strange indeed. He and his tingle hardly have time to shoot Beckett a _What’s Her Angle?_ side eye, before the woman has the nerve to come right out with it: She wants in on the investigation. She wants a favor. 

His jaw drops. He turns eagerly to Beckett, anxious to witness what will no doubt be an epic takedown of this unpleasant woman in all her effrontery. None of his senses tingle when it comes. It is an epic takedown of Lee Wax and all her ilk. And he, unfortunately, seems to fall under the ilk heading. 

It leaves him blinking, honestly. Beckett, who most definitely has a flair for storytelling, has made her sweeping exit and left him feeling uncomfortably like his mother’s son in the lack-of-self-awareness department. She has left him blinking at Lee Wax and wondering if his instantaneous loathing for the woman is actually self-loathing in disguise. 

Uncertainty on the ilk front is a thing of the moment, though. He’s a better writer than Lee Wax. He is a better investigator and storyteller, and however convenient a prop he’s just made for the good Detective, he’s nothing like the parasitic opportunist their friendly neighborhood ghostwriter is obviously itching to be. 

But his professional crisis of confidence has no sooner passed than another crisis is closing in, quite literally. Lee Wax is in his personal space. She drops her voice low and compliments him—writer to writer—on his sweet gig. He understands the game she is eager to play and it hits him that he really does not like her. 

It’s a tautology at this point and something entirely new at the same time. He does not like Lee Wax, quite specifically, in the way she would like him to like her right this very second. She is pouring it on thick in trying to hitch herself to his all-access pass. He responds in kind, more out of reflex than anything else. 

She produces a business card from somewhere about her person. He takes it and says he’ll see what he can do, because this is how the game goes. 

He suspects she’s disappointed to find that he hasn’t stopped to watch the sway of her hips as she clicks her way down the hall to the elevator. He suspects that she’ll turn for a final, sultry look and be utterly perplexed by the sight of his back retreating in the opposite direction. Lord knows he’s perplexed by the urge to simply drop the card in the nearest trash can. He doesn’t drop it in the nearest trash can, but he doesn’t pocket it either. 

He stands, for a moment, on the edge of the bullpen, contemplating all of it—the card, the game, the dame. He does not like Lee Wax, and she might even know that. Whether she does or doesn’t is hardly relevant in this familiar context. Hell, she’s probably thinking, as he has so often thought, that a little creatively leveraged loathing can be a downright asset from time to time.

Beckett is at her desk with the Captain. They have their own stalker shrine now and she’s clearly leading him through the latest developments. He’s eager to join them. He’s eager to get back a bit of his own for the collateral damage she’d gleefully done him in taking a swipe at Lee Wax. He is eager to be in her company. 

He stands, for a moment, on the verge of an epiphany he’d really rather not have about why it is that he really, really does not like Lee Wax. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: There are no things here. None. 


	9. Nigh Invulnerable—Little Girl Lost (1 x 09)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One of Richard Castle’s more infuriating attributes is the fact that it is damned near impossible to insult him. He has an ego made of rhino hide, and for months now, she has spent her days trying to land devastating blows, only to have him grin and take her most pointed barbs as a compliment. When the boys or the captain or the uniforms at a scene play rough with him when he’s clumsy, when he states the obvious as though it’s profound, he beams back at them—gosh, golly—completely delighted to be one of the boys. 

> _“Is that supposed to be an insult?”  
>  — Richard Castle, Little Girl Lost, 1 x 09_

* * *

One of Richard Castle’s more infuriating attributes is the fact that it is damned near impossible to insult him. He has an ego made of rhino hide, and for months now, she has spent her days trying to land devastating blows, only to have him grin and take her most pointed barbs as a compliment. When the boys or the captain or the uniforms at a scene play rough with him when he’s clumsy, when he states the obvious as though it’s profound, he beams back at them— _gosh, golly_ —completely delighted to be one of the boys. 

He is impervious to sarcasm, he shrugs off the abuse she heaps upon him, and he greets her very best caustic comments, with a sunny, _thank-you-ma’am-may-I-have-another_ attitude. He is resilient and good natured. He is, for a perennially overexcited child in a man’s body, paradoxically unflappable, and it is _maddening._ It’s maddening right up to the point that Will Sorenson comes to town. When Will Sorenson comest to town, Richard Castle’s strangely invulnerable nature turns … interesting. 

Will should have a Superman curl in the middle of his forehead. She remembers thinking that the first time she saw him stride into the squad room on that terrible case. She remembers telling him that later, softly laughing as she traced its ideal path, being utterly blindsided by the way it killed the moment between them. He, with his square jaw, with his high and tight flat top back then, was not amused by the Man of Steel implications. 

_I feel it, Kate. I feel every bit of it,_ he’d said, pacing away from her. 

_I didn’t mean …_ she’d said, following. 

There had been good times with him. There had been fun and companionship, intensity and work and bleeding off the stress of the job in the bedroom, lights out, no talking, and both of them dead asleep two minutes afterward. There had been good times, but she’d done a lot of _I didn’t mean_ -ing in those six months. She’d done a lot of following, though not quite enough to figure in the equation that had him walking out the door.

But the good times and the bad with Will are in the past. She is, right now, neither awash in nostalgia for the good times, nor fixated on the painful way things ended. She is, instead, curious. She is interested to see how this will go. 

It’s odd to see the two of them together, not that they form any kind of pair. She rejects that idea absolutely, but it’s interesting to see the way Will bristles—the way he squares his shoulders and initiates pissing-match protocols as though this is some kind of either/or proposition. He follows an utterly predictable guy-derived game plan, and It’s interesting to see the way Castle’s brand of unabashed and unabashable confidence absolutely stymies him.

It’s interesting that what’s interesting is mostly not about Will. 

It seems like it is, at first. Everything in the world seems like it’s about Will in the agonizing moments when she has to confront the fact of him, the fact that he’s been back in New York for months. She wants to kill the Captain for not warning her, she wants to cry on Lanie’s shoulder all over again, she wants to crawl into a deep, dark hole and pull it in after her.

But the agony, by and large, passes. There’s a twinge here and there. She’d like to land a fist in one of Will’s manly soft places when he takes _Together? No …_ as an either/or proposition and kisses her. There’s a twinge when he’s kissing her and she entertains the possibility of lights off, no talking, and both of them dead asleep two minutes afterward, because God knows she could stand to bleed off some tension from this kiss. 

But, by and large, all of that passes, and it’s Castle she’s interested in as things unfold. He glides right by a schoolyard taunt about living with his mother and flashes his Official Nancy Drew Fan Club card. He crawls around Angela Candela’s bedroom with a flashlight, trying not to wake her for pink bunny reasons, for urgent Monkey-Bunkey reasons, and there isn’t a shred of self-consciousness about any of that.

She is well aware she’ll hate this complete lack of self-consciousness again tomorrow or the next day. Once Will has gone wherever he’s going next, it will drive her absolutely insane that she takes the time to hand-craft artisanal digs just for him, and he doesn’t even flinch. But until then, with Will bristling, posturing, trying desperately to provoke, the fact that Richard Castle is nigh on impossible to insult is pretty damned interesting. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: All the things you are not are not mine? (Not a thing.) 


	10. The Glass Cell—A Death in the Family (1 x 10)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She wears a dress of her mom’s to prom, he decides. He imagines it in detail—cut-work lace over taffeta in bright emerald green, a satin empire waist band a shade darker, a full A-line skirt. He envisions her with mismatched quasi-punky hair hanging down to half hide her dramatic eye-makeup. She stands out, of course. In a sea of off-the-shoulder, halter neck, heavy fabrics in primary colors—crayon red, royal blue, black, black, white, white, red again, with an ill-advised plunge neckline. She stands out. 

> _“You know reality isn’t fiction, right?”  
>  — Dr. Clark Murray, A Death in the Family (1 x 10)_
> 
> * * *

She wears a dress of her mom’s to prom, he decides. He imagines it in detail—cut-work lace over taffeta in bright emerald green, a satin empire waist band a shade darker, a full A-line skirt. He envisions her with mismatched quasi-punky hair hanging down to half hide her dramatic eye-makeup. She stands out, of course. In a sea of off-the-shoulder, halter neck, heavy fabrics in primary colors—crayon red, royal blue, black, black, white, white, red again, with an ill-advised plunge neckline. She stands out. 

She likes her date, though she doesn’t exactly let him know that. He imagines that, too. She doesn’t exactly let _anyone_ know that she likes this boy on the verge of being a man, because she’s not sure that she’s supposed to. He’s quiet and sensitive. Not a dork—not outright unpopular, but a dark horse candidate for asking her in the first place, and her unexpected, unhesitating _yes_ had sent shockwaves through the eleventh grade. 

She is awkward on the dance floor. She is a vision in her mother’s dress, but there is _architecture_ to it. There is a hidden foundation that requires time travel of her ribs, her spine, her hips, and her date—the boy on the verge of being a man—has no idea where to put his hands during the slow songs. She has no idea where to put hers, so she locks her fingers behind his neck. She breathes _Let’s get out of here_ well before Boyz II Men get to the spoken-word part, and they do. 

They race across the ballroom with their fingers linked, laughing like fools. They leave her friends, his friends, the tiny intersection of _their_ friends to gawp as they bang through the double doors.They roam the streets around the hotel in a spiral pattern, talking and talking. 

She shivers and pulls the cream-colored silk-and-seed-pearl wrap close around her. With well-intentioned gallantry, he tries to drop his tuxedo jacket over her shoulders. He misses, and they both watch in horror as the long tails drag through something nameless and awful before he can catch it. 

The hem of her dress is dirty and her mom’s dyed-to-match pumps with their rhinestone butterfly clips will never be the same. But they share french fries at a nameless diner. They share a tentative kiss in the back of a cab as the boy escorts her home. They share a burning, frenzied, back-against-the-glass follow-up in the doorway of her apartment as the sun comes up. 

She misses curfew by a lot. Her mom brings her coffee and toast in bed long after morning has tipped over into afternoon. She asks a million impertinent questions about the boy she likes, about the evening, about her plans to save up for what should be an astonishing dry cleaning bill. 

This is how it happens. This is what he decides. 

* * *

She sprains her ankle on move-in day. He knows. He sees clearly how the events unfold. 

She has a plan. She has keys in hand by 8:01 am. She has a spot for the van with her things, hardly a block away, and her second-hand office chair can serve as a makeshift dolly. She has almost nothing. It’ll be two dozen quick trips, she figures, but the apartment is _full_ of junk. 

_Oh yeah_ , the creepy building manager tells her _, last guy skipped out._

The junk is her problem, apparently. _Her_ problem. She plumps down on some kind of ottoman and immediately regrets it as an oily smell rises up. It’s not just the ottoman, though. The whole place reeks of food and animal fat. She registers the distant clatter of dishes, of silverware, and the hiss of a hot grill rising up through the floor. 

She props her elbows on her knees and her chin on her fists. She wastes ten precious minutes of the three hours before she has to have the van back contemplating the space that is smaller, dingier, filthier than the unit she saw when she signed the lease. 

She hauls herself up and lugs the ottoman and a broken laundry basket full of dirty t-shirts with her down to the dumpster. She bumps milk crates full of electronics odds and ends down the stairs. She carries awkward lamps like jousting lances. 

It’s a box of kitchen things that does her in. It’s a mile wide and heavy. She knows she should unpack and repack it. She should make two trips, three, four, but she’s tired of this. She misses a step. She goes down to the landing. She can feel the rush of heat into the ankle she has wrenched badly. 

There’s a neighbor—a pair of neighbors—who hear the commotion. They rescue her, Cleo and Pete, who are just a little older than she is. They extricate her from underneath the box. They help her into their apartment and give her an ice pack. They give her a stiff drink and an ace bandage. 

They share stories about the guy who skipped out in the middle of the night—his questionable activities and his even more questionable taste in music. They order pizza and won’t take her money when she offers. The three of them agree that the building manager almost certainly collects clown paintings by serial killers. 

They insist that she spend the night on their couch. She protests. She tries to put weight on her ankle, then gives in. She spends her first night _not_ in her first apartment staring at a ceiling that belongs to strangers with tears leaking from the corners of her eyes because her fucking ankle hurts. Because she doesn’t have the money to pay for another day of the damned van. Because her mother is dead and she is alone in the world. 

He knows all this. He sees it clearly. 

* * *

He cannot picture the shadows on her skin in that basement room. He sees the backs of his own hands criss-crossed infinitely with weak, unflattering light coming in through the cage. But he cannot see hers. Would her fingernails be as neat and no-fuss as they are today, or would they have been ragged with the pain of all the long years before she made it that far? 

Would she—and the possibility is like a lattice work of burning hot ice spreading through him from the inside—would she have gotten the chain for her mother’s ring when she first put on the uniform? Was there a time in that dingy apartment—in her college days with her dad drowning and her left wrist as yet bare—was there a time when when she would have slipped it on her finger each morning instead of ducking her head to let the delicate links of a think gold chain slither down over her collar bones?

He doesn’t know, any more than he knows if she would have risked the rickety table with its hard, back-breaking chair. He cannot say whether she would have waited for the most desolate hour each possible night, then set to work right where he did, or if she would have, instead, arranged herself on the cracked tile floor, knees drawn up and hunched over the tight beam of a penlight. 

He looks for signs of her in the creases and ragged edges, the rusty indentation of an ancient paperclip removed and replaced, the corner of a thin stack torn away along with a now-missing staple in a moment of frustration. He scours the faded, triple-carbon paperwork and holds the glossy, terrible photos at an oblique angle to the light from his desk lamp, the light from his computer screen. In the riot of smudged, overlapping fingerprints he wonders which might be hers. 

It’s no use, this afterthought of a search. She is nowhere. There is no detail remembered from his own few hours spent in that basement room, no physical trace of her presence in the file itself that sparks the rush of absolute clarity with which he envisions her at the junior prom, her on move-in day at that first three-story walk-up that smelled of chicken wings. 

She is nowhere, because he has never once bothered to imagine her—not once. He relives the abrupt sting of her rapped out pair of questions— _You don’t think I’ve haven’t been down there? You don’t think I haven’t memorized every line in that file?_ He sits, staring at the file now with tide of shame advancing, receding, advancing. 

He didn’t think. In all these weeks, he has not once thought about the space between the wound delivered and the scars she bears. He has not once thought about the dreams she must have cast off, what it must have cost her to forge a path to that basement room. He has not once considered what those long years must have been like. He has never stopped to ask himself how the woman she is now—the relentless, fiercely intelligent, _extraordinary_ woman he has come to know—could ever have come to accept her mother’s death as a random, wayward event.

He thinks now. He asks himself now. He tries, now, to picture the shadows on her skin, the tense outline of her body and the tight beam of a penlight. He tries to imagine that lonely work, but he can’t. 

She is gone from him. She is nowhere.   
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This is an especially weird not!thing. I had to decide that Castle has the actual Johanna Beckett file that he’s taken, not just copies. That doesn’t make much sense, but the autopsy photos look to be originals, complete with labels and handling wear. Fixation on those details is just a distraction from how not a thing this is. 


End file.
